"I think you'd better know. Lewis had some business of his own after dinner, it seems. En route he drove past Adelaide's flat."
Vivien sat bolt upright. "What is it?"
"There are lights on, apparently."
"Oh no."
"You didn't leave any lamps switched on, did you?"
"No. No, I'm sure I didn't—"
"He asked if you were living there, because he said he had the impression, from a couple of things you said tonight, that you were back in Camden. Look, Vivien, it's probably nothing. Maybe there's some automatic master switch she forgot to tell you about."
"I'm sure there isn't. Addie's—She'd never bother to install anything like that. And I'd have seen it happen when I was there."
"Look. I'm going to stop off for the keys at the place I rent when I'm in London. It's a bare, uncomfortable hole, which is why I haven't asked you back there—good enough for working and sleeping, and that's all. But for now I suggest I drop you off there. While I deal with this."
"You think someone has broken into Addie's flat."
"No, I just think we need to be sure."
"If they have, it's my fault. I should have stayed—that was the whole idea. Oh God, I didn't even get round to calling her. I have to come with you."
Connor looked at her assessingly. She thought he would say no, and she would have to argue.
Instead, after a moment, he nodded. "All right."
It was after two by the time they reached Coronet Square. A pall of London silence and dark hung everywhere, only the fake Victorian street lamps offering their milky glow. In the park, disturbed by the taxi's engine, a bird woke and shrilled harshly.
The driver spoke. "Are you going to be long? I have got a home to go to, mate."
Connor handed him a couple of notes. "I'd appreciate it if you'd wait."
Taking the notes, the driver folded his arms resignedly.
"Vivien, maybe stay in the cab."
"No. I feel responsible. I'm coining with you."
"Okay. But I go first."
At the end of the tree-garnished terrace, where no lights otherwise showed, Addie's flat blared out like a lighted Christmas tree.
"If it's a thief, he's charmingly indiscreet," said Connor.
He put a key into the lock. The door swung back to display the fully illuminated hall.
There was no sound. No sense of movement. In the glare of light, nothing else seemed unusual or disturbed.
They advanced slowly, Connor keeping Vivien behind him. The octagonal room ahead was also lit, and the dining room to the left—but the cloakroom and cupboard doors, too, had been opened and their lights turned on.
They edged forward, at first cautious, and entered the main room, where every lamp, plus the overhead bulbs, blazed.
After they had checked there, finding nothing, they moved silently on to the other areas of the apartment.
Everything was the same. Rooms, hallways, bathrooms and cupboards opened and fully lit. And nothing, aside from that, seemed different.
Reaching the kitchen at last, after a painstaking search, they halted in perplexity.
"Nothing's been touched—has it?"
"I don't think so, Connor. Maybe I wouldn't know… little things—but nothing feels different. Only this sense someone was here. I've checked the clothes she left in her wardrobes—they don't look as if they've been touched. But then, I don't know what they were like to start with. All the dust sheets seem to be in place. What about the boxes?"
"They look fine. And the crates." Connor leaned back on a counter in the blindingly white world of the kitchen. "They did open the fridge, but you say it was empty."
"I think they opened the fridge like the cupboards—so the light would come on."
"Yeah. I think you're right, Vivien. Listen, I'm going out to check the statue."
Vivien's heart plummeted like a stone. She had been trying so hard not to think of the statue, all this while.
"Could that be what they were after?"
"Possibly. Although going over the garden walls might have been more simple. No one's tried to force the French doors. And look, the conservatory's locked up, and that padlock takes some shifting."
Vivien said nothing.
Connor said, "The obvious solution is they had keys. But there's only this one set we know of. And Adelaide's own, which she'll have with her in France. And no, I don't think she's suddenly come back. I know her schedule. France, then Barcelona. She wouldn't pass that up."
"Connor—"
"What is it?"
Faltering, instead she murmured, "Let's check the statue."
"Not us. This time you stay in here. Leave all the lights on. I've got the flashlight, too. Just in case. Frankly, this looks to me more some sort of imbecilic joke."
"Joke."
He undid the awkward padlock of the conservatory door.
Vivien watched him go out. She thought of the rose, now crumbled and invisible, and the other roses, decapitated in the octagonal room, and the wine drunk. She wanted to follow him along the path, but common sense told her he needed to concentrate out there, not be looking out for her.
She poised on the brink of the garden, between dark and light.
The pleasure of desire and anticipation had drained from her, leaving her cold and trembling.
Connor had vanished into darkness.
And what did the darkness hold? Only something so bizarre as a jokey burglar? Or something far worse…
The garden was so quiet, all she could hear now was her heart. London seemed to have gone away.
And Connor didn't come back. And didn't.
Vivien took two steps forward, her movements about to tilt into a run.
A man's figure came from the tangled lilacs. For a second it was only white—then the flashlight beam speared ahead of him. Connor.
"Hey, Vivien, it's okay. Darling, you're shaking. Come on. We'll go back inside."
"Is it there?"
"The statue? Oh, Patrick's just fine. Still a bit skewed on the plinth, but no worse than before. I didn't know you cared about him so much—" He was half laughing, holding her to him, kissing her hair. "Should I be jealous?" he said. And then a kind of iron stillness seemed to fill him. She felt it through his clothes, his skin. "No," he said softly, "I'm not the jealous type, ami."
"Connor?" She raised her head to tell him everything that had already happened here—sinister, uncanny events that must have some rational explanation. But in that instant, she saw his expression. "What is it?"
"Nothing. It's nothing."
But his face seemed itself carved and soulless. His eyes black gems, impenetrable—without life.
"Connor," she said again. "Connor."
She felt him take a breath.
The terrible, beautiful mask his face had become slowly grew human again. The eyes, alive once more, stared harshly into hers.
His voice rang cold, searing her with ice. "But that I am forbid, I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood—" Suddenly his head tipped back. Connor bellowed with laughter. Astounded she gazed at him—until he looked down at her again, his face the face she knew. "Sorry, Vivien. And yes, I have acted the ghost of Hamlet's dad. Direct quote."
"I know the quote. You'd have gone on to tell me the tale would knot up my hair like quills on the fretful porpentine."
"Yes, my lovely girl, how could I ever think you wouldn't know every play I've ever acted in, let alone hammed up."
With relief, she was now laughing a little, too, but also shivering. She pressed into the warmth of his body, and his arms held her close. While somewhere, unheeded, the inner voice warned on and on that the dark was not separate from him. It lived within him.
What did any of that matter?
His mouth sought hers. He had put the flashlight down on the ground, where its light splashed up at them. Light blazed everywhere, but darkness was here in the circle of his arms, an
d she loved this darkness.
She had lived, she confusedly thought, for these kisses, waiting and waiting for them, and for this pressure of their two bodies one on the other—like the relief from hunger or thirst.
Arousal had fooled her. Rather than leave her, it had only lain in wait.
His tongue moved in her mouth. Her tongue encircled, played with his, a duel of delight. Pure energy coursed down her spine. She was filled with an electric current, as if her blood altered to lightning.
The brick wall of the house pushed roughly into her back. So what.
Connor's mouth had moved from hers, traveled to her neck, melting her flesh—his hands slid over her breasts, and liquid shudders rushed through her. Through both their clothing his own hunger for her, swollen hard against her, signaled its intention impressively. Her legs were weak.
Nothing mattered—it was true—nothing but this.
"Vivien." He spoke hoarsely into her skin. "Listen to me. This flat—Will you mind if—"
"If… ?"
"Do we have to wait? I heard that idiot's taxi drive off a minute ago. There's a bed here—the bed you slept in, yes? But not if you don't want to… "
His fingers, skillful, glorious, woke buds of starry sweetness on her breasts. Her belly was molten. Her whole body thrummed like the struck strings of guitar.
"Yes," she said. "Here. Anywhere."
Any where… against this wall… a tree… on the paving in the utter dark…
She didn't care, so long as they possessed each other now. Nothing was real but this.
He paused to lock the conservatory door, but all the while he gripped her against him, kissing her deeply even as he coaxed the key to operate the lock. Then, without apparent effort, he swung her up off the floor and into his arms. He held her in the air, kissing her body through the dress, and her arms and the tops of her breasts that the dress left bare.
They kept every light on. Or forgot every light. In the bedroom, the bed, stripped of everything but its mattress, received their bodies.
Here he peeled the dress from her. Vivien fought the urge to rip the shirt off his back. Together they undid the buttons. He pulled it off and threw it away.
Vivien filled her hands with his upper body, his back, so hard and smoothly made, the evenly tanned skin, the lean athlete's muscles. High in the dark hair that fanned across his chest, her fingers found a narrow ridging scar, but in those moments, it was only one with his intoxicating flesh. His pants and shorts had been added to the heap of clothes slung on the carpet. They lay across Vivien's undergarments… possessively.
Now the central hardness of his body, let free in its arrogant power, became Vivien's plaything, for a while subservient to her stroking fingers, the teasing of her tongue and lips. He lay back, holding her to him, his hands tangling and working in her cascading hair, groaning as she toyed with and savored the promise of his dominance over her.
Ripples of pleasure, that she could clearly feel, pulsed through the flat, hard belly under her hands. His long, sculptured body had tensed to an immeasurable tautness. He was rigid now as any marble, with desire—but each sound of pleasure he gave, every tiny spasm that crossed through his bowstring tension, scored its resonant echo over and over, deep within Vivien's core. With every caress she offered him now, her own trembling, dizzying need increased. Finally, having enslaved him, she herself was helpless, weak and moaning with her longing. Then he drew her away, folded her body closely down again upon his own, her thighs now lying over his, her feet on his ankles, her breasts on his chest, her face on his face. He kissed her with a total and wonderful invasion, sparing no infinitesimal area of her lips or mouth. Immobilized, blended into his body, Vivien lay there, his subject now, his.
When he had had his fill, for the moment, of this, he turned her, as if she were light herself as a piece of silk. He pinned her beneath him, lying down on and over her, heavy, remorselessly in charge, then lifted away again, letting her see all she wanted of him, and of the peak of desire to which she had brought him.
This man—breathless she ran her hands around his hips, upward to his ribs—against the light, his face was partly shadowed—a leopard's face with eclipse-dark eyes, and the fine pelt of his hair sketched over his body, and falling like wings of dense black fire from his head, across his back… A black wave of this hair came gliding forward as he dipped his hands, his mouth, to her breasts, fluttering them, scorching them, bringing her such piercing tremors and starts of sensation, she felt she must turn inside out.
She arched upward, catching his hair, his neck. He held her back, shook his head, accepting only her surrender, forcing her to endure once more the exquisite torture of his tongue and lips. She could not have said which of them breathed the fastest or more desperately.
The leopard raised his head. Again he leaned above her, his eyes narrowed and blazing.
"Connor—"
"Now, Vivien?"
She thought she could not speak again—
"I should make you wait," he said. "After the struggle I've had to keep myself on leash since I met you."
But his breathing was still as ragged and rapid as her own. Vivien, confident suddenly in her own powers, stretched herself for him, like a cat. She raised her arms to display for him her breasts, swollen and themselves erect from his kisses. She offered her body like a feast for his starvation.
"Make me wait, then, Connor. If you can."
"Oh, I can make you wait, my love. You and I, I think, we both know how to do that."
Through the golden delirium, a shadow seemed to scud across the light—she let it go, had no time for it. Instead she idled her hand on him, on that carven belly, that arrogant maleness that was both her slave and her master. Connor laughed deep in his throat. He leaned down to her body, and his smolder of hair poured across her stomach like a curtain.
Within the secrecy of her thighs now, points of irresistible and kissing flame. Primal music flowered inside her. She flung out her arms and gripped the sides of the bed to keep herself afloat on this leaping sea of ecstasy.
He lifted away only twice more. The first time, through dazzled, swimming eyes, Vivien watched as he flaunted himself, adeptly dressing himself for her protection—she had never before seen a man perform this necessary act as such an elegant and provocative type of theater.
Then he lay back flat on her, his face against her thighs, going on with the scarcely endurable intimacy of his kisses—while his arms slid up her body, the fingers fastening again, with a madness of tickling sweetness, circling on her breasts.
From far off, Vivien felt herself begin to dissolve—but he had judged her reactions to a hairsbreadth.
There came a surge, a heat of connection and longed-for impact. He caught her to him, his eyes now pitiless and black, finding her core, but this time neither with mouth or fingers, his body at last sheathed within her.
He had filled her, the force and strength of him, an anchor in the tempest.
Together, one creature, they thrust and strove, blinded and calling to each other under the crash of the approaching tidal wave.
Only Connor now could hold her through the cataclysm. Frenzied, her hands slid down his back, tightening on his buttocks, as she crushed herself against and against the shield of his body.
The wave broke. She felt the steel of his control shatter at her singing cries. As all final barriers gave way, in the tumbling agony of joy, she heard his voice join with hers—wordless, a sound like pain—and held him—to protect, to love, to cherish and adore, even if the sky should fall, till death, and beyond.
The room still murmured—inaudibly but unmistakably—with the aftershocks of fulfilled sexual love. Under her skin, Vivien's body sparkled.
She found she was not afraid that he would now change towards her—not afraid either of shadows or statues or anything at all.
They lay side by side, looking at each other, their hands lightly clasped.
They said nothing. Nothing
needed to be said.
After a while, he raised himself on his elbow, leaned over her and kissed her, chastely and intently, almost thoughtfully.
"What shall we do now?" he said.
"Climb Everest?"
"Why not, my sorceress. But why anything so ordinary?"
"True, it's very banal. Perhaps swim the Atlantic."
"Without backup, right? No support vessels."
"Absolutely none."
"Vivien," he said, "you are the most beautiful woman I have ever known. Everything about you, Vivien. I think you are the Vivien, Merlin's downfall, the woman who shut him in the crystal cliff, or whatever it was." He lay back. "Thank you for this. Thank you for letting this happen—here. I believe we just performed the perfect exorcism."
She laughed. She didn't care as to the exorcism of what.
"Where are you going?" he said.
"Thirsty. Water, and some coffee?"
"Yes. Adelaide's coffee is quite good. She stores it like a squirrel. But we can replace it for her tomorrow."
Tomorrow, Vivien thought. There will be a tomorrow for us.
Naked, they walked together back to the kitchen. There, in the bright white light, they drank bottled water and constructed a wonderful pot of Addie's best roast Havana coffee. They took it back to bed, along with some sheets. But though the bed was made up, they next made the mistake of lying down on it. And soon the wonderful coffee set to cold gravy in the pot.
* * *
Chapter 8
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Vivien's decision to move back into Addie's flat was dictated mostly by her sense of honor. But, she had to admit, she had taken on board Connor's remark about exorcism. It seemed to her their lovemaking had indeed cleansed and lightened the rooms. In the sunny morning, as they made fresh coffee from Addie's rifled store, Vivien half wondered if her anxieties, or her hang-ups from the past, had even caused some kind of poltergeist activity.
There was no trace of the rose in the conservatory. She began to ask herself if she had imagined it. Imagined the other episode… Falling in love, she had heard, was like the onset of a dangerous fever. Even the photo of Emily…
When Darkness Falls Page 17
